Unraveled, Week 48/2021

It's December, already! Doesn't it seem like we were just starting the year and hoping that it would erase the bad memories of 2020? I won't open up that can of worms this morning, but I will say that I'm still bewildered at the fact that this year is almost over. But it's Wednesday, my day every week to check in with what I'm making and reading and to link up with Kat and the Unravelers, so let's focus on that!

I will likely be dragging today and might need to catch a cat nap or two because I was up until late last night (11:30) knitting furiously to finish this hat so it would count for the end of the 90% Knitting Nature MAL:

Staying up late to finish a project is very uncharacteristic for me, but I needed to finish this project to get me my full-year participation in the makealong (which earns me a special skein of yarn). It's a bit ridiculous if you think about it, but I like nothing better than arbitrary knitting goals! This hat -- the same formula I followed for Rainbow's -- used exactly 100 g/400 yds. of the yarn. My skein weighed a bit more than 100 g to start, so there was no yarn chicken being played at the end.

I now find myself with only one WIP, my Shifty pullover, but I have two time-sensitive projects to cast on soon: a hat for my father-in-law, which I'm planning to knit holding several strands of fingering weight together, and the replacement blanket for my nephew. My goal is to knit the hat this week and finish the blanket before we leave for Florida.

You all know that I don't celebrate Advent, but I do like the yarn or fiber sets that are sold around this time of year, and I got one from Fibernymph Dye Works as I have the past several years. This year I opted for twelve 20 g mini skeins plus the full skein of the special holiday colorway. I received my bag of goodies several weeks ago but have been saving it. This morning I opened the first mini skein, and it's a beauty:

I'm planning on knitting another big shawl or stole with this year's collection, but I may wait until I've opened several packages to see how the colors look together before I decide on a pattern.

Reading has been good this week and has been keeping me good company while I knit like fiend. I've finished two recent releases in the past week.

With a weird title and a strange collection of parallel narratives, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book that's very hard to describe. I really didn't know much about it when I put it on hold at the library but was counting on the fact that I adored the author's All the Light We Cannot See. This book has three separate stories, or so it seems, that come together over the course of the book. At first, they seem so wildly unconnected that you wonder how they'll come together, but they do, though, in my opinion, not as well as I would have liked. The writing is beautiful, though, and the book could be thought of as a tribute to books, libraries, librarians, and the sanctity of the written word. I gave it 4 stars.

I finished Harlem Shuffle yesterday while working on my hat. Despite the fact that it was about half the length of Cloud Cuckoo Land, it took me just as long to read and seemed much slower. This book follows a furniture salesman in Harlem in the late '50s and early '60s who is trying to improve his lot in life and gets embroiled in the world of crime, first unwillingly and then of his own volition. There is no doubt that Colson Whitehead is a gifted writer, but this book didn't excite or move me the way his earlier books have. I think perhaps this was just not the right book for me. I gave it 3 stars.

I'm still reading some hard-copy books that I really want to finish, but I started listening to The Sentence on Monday and am just loving it. I also just got We Are Not Like Them from the library this morning and hope to start it later today. I'll also note that Harlem Shuffle was the 130th book I've finished this year, which officially doubles my goal for the year of 65 books. Crazy pants!

How about you -- what are you working on and reading this week?